Most bread sold on store shelves is packaged within a plastic bread bag. Typically, a supplier will manufacture the bags from a continuous sheet of plastic. The bags manufactured have an opening and a flap portion extending from the opening which includes side by side holes. The manufacturer puts the individual bags on a U shaped metal piece with each leg of the U shaped piece passing through a hole to form what is known as a wicket. Usually, 400 to 500 individual bags are positioned on a wicket. The wickets are then shipped to the baker.
The baker will take the individual wickets and position them on a bread bagging machine. The majority of bread in the U.S.A. is bagged on a machine manufactured by AM&F referred to as the "mark 50" machine ("50" meaning a capacity for bagging about 50 loaves a minute). The mark 50 is provided with an air supply which blows open the top bag of the wicket and inserts a shovel like device into the open end of the bag. A loaf of bread is then positioned in line with the open end of the bag and the shovel like structure tears the bag from the wicket and draws the bag over the bread until the bread is completely within the bag. The shovel like structure then releases the bag and the filled bag is transferred along the machine for tying the open end closed with a tie, commonly a wire tie or plastic tie.
The mark 50 machine relies heavily on each bag being held at both holes by the U shaped wicket piece as the bag is blown open by the air pressure. Clearly, if only one hole is properly mounted on a leg of the U shaped piece, the air pressure will simply blow the bag off the side of the wicket, causing a malfunction. An operator must be present to remedy such a malfunction caused by a "one holer" bag.
In response to the problem of one holer bags, bag manufacturers have attempted to design bag manufacturing devices which minimize the problem. Commonly, a rotating cylinder with arms extending radially outward from the cylinder, take the individual bags and hold them on the arms by air vacuum as the cylinder rotates. The cylinder rotates the individual bag onto the U shaped piece.
However, one holers continue to occur even with this device. Therefore, the operators of the machine must manually flip through the bags on a particular wicket in an attempt to find these one holers. Every one holer found is simply torn off the wicket, as it would be too expensive to properly place the bag on the wicket manually. As these bags are normally printed with the particular logo and information of the baker at the time of wicketing, the bags cannot be recycled into the plastic extruder and must simply be thrown away as scrap and, even after this labor intensive search, one holers still are sent to bakers, causing disruption of the bagging machines.
Thus, the present techniques for manufacturing bread bags and bagging bread have significant disadvantages. The manufacture of the bags involves labor intensive steps which still do not render the wickets shipped to the baker free from one holers. The present inability to eliminate one holers creates significant problems for the baker as the bread is being packaged, which reflects not only upon the efficiency of the baker's operation, but the baker's relationship with the bag manufacturer. Therefore, a need exists for an apparatus and method which overcomes these deficiencies in the present art.
Furthermore, the existing bag manufacturing systems are forced to operate at a speed which is slower than desirable because of the need to minimize the presence of one holers and to ensure proper separation of each individual bag. Also, the amount of labor required to assemble a wicket of bags is a significant disadvantage of existing manufacturing systems.